Interested In The Program?

Below is my application that I just turned. Feel free to provide any feedback or ideas of how we can make this project a success for students!

About You

If a friend designed for you a t-shirt that described you perfectly, what would it say?

Answer: Where there is coffee, there is a way.

Tell us how you have transformed your practice, your classroom, your school, or your community (500 Character Limit).

Answer: I returned to my HS to impact the school that had impacted me. I started the tech movement in our district: joined the tech committee, played an integral part in the implementation of Google Apps, Chromebooks, & encouraged improvement of technology infrastructure in the district. Also, I organized & setup the Google Apps Domain in the HS, then the district as a whole. I redesigned my classroom from a lecture (1950’s structure) to using various tech tools so the students became the researchers.

Grow: Where do you find new ideas and inspiration? (500 Character Limit)

Answer: 1st, my students. Many of my subtle, but meaningful changes in my approach have come from suggestions of students. 2nd, my fellow teachers that I teach with both in the past and presently. Their willingness to challenge me, or their new ideas make think, “How can I do that?!” The 3rd & final place is my PLN via Twitter, Google+, EdCamps, etc. Constantly I see what they’re doing in their classroom, or challenging questions they ask that cause me to re-evaluate my own practices.

Your Vision

Your Vision: Title

Answer: MyMaps Global Initiative

Your Vision: Brief Description: (250 Character Limit)

Answer: Database for students & teachers to display/collaborate on MyMaps projects with 3 part: Details on all the various methods of using MyMaps, display completed projects, space for MyMaps that can be collaboratively completed by other teachers/students.

Imagine you are able to have coffee with one person (currently living) who would mentor you in support of your vision. Who would you pick and why? (500 Character Limit)

Answer: I’d pick Stafford Marquardt as a mentor, who was the product manager for Google MyMaps. He introduced me to MyMaps at the EdTechTeam Google Summit held in July at Kansas City. Obviously I’d be willing to work with anyone in that product line, but I greatly appreciate his knowledge, conversational ability, & willingness to share ideas. Not only would he help me to understand the intricacies of how best to manipulate MyMaps, but he’d also be a means to improve the resource for teachers.

Closing

Today I submitted my application but will not hear about wether or not I was accepted till May 10th. Best of luck to everyone, and continue to change the world through your students!

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Google Forms – Responses, Flubaroo, and Classroom (Part 2)

You checked out the first Google Forms Post and you created a Google Form to give to your students. That’s awesome! Now what…

Responses

Once the assessment is designed to your liking, click the “Responses” tab at the top of the Google Form. This will give you a myriad of options to collect student information. First, create a Google Spreadsheet by clicking the “sheets” button at the top.
This will give you the option to “Create A New Sheet” or attach it as a tab into an existing spreadsheet. If you are giving this as an assessment, then at this point you are ready to share it with your students!

Tip: Technically you don’t have to create the spreadsheet before giving the test, but that is just how I normally do it.

As students begin taking the assessment, their responses will appear on the Google Form Response page (but only after submitting the assessment).

Example of Student Responses

What’s great is that it gives you the overview of each question! For Example, 37% of participants chose the wrong answer. Questions to consider: Bad wording of question? Insufficient teaching of the material? Etc. You can also click on “Individual” and see the participants assessment and which answer they specifically selected. This is less intuitive than the “Summary” tab, but still helpful none-the-less if you want to see how a specific student answered.

Flubaroo

One of the great things about using Google Forms, especially for Formative Assessments, is the ability to use Flubaroo to auto-grade the participants answers. Realize though that Flubaroo is not a Google Forms add-on but a Google Sheets add-on. To access Flubaroo, go to the corresponding sheet (click on the sheet button at the top of the “Responses” tab). Once on the spreadsheet, do the following: click “add-on,” select “Get add-ons,” search “Flubaroo,” click “+ Free” to add it to your sheet.

Tip: After you “Get Flubaroo,” it will always be an option for your spreadsheets, even if you don’t create the spreadsheet through Google Forms.

Answer Key Gif

Now that Flubaroo is added to your spreadsheet, you have a lot of different options. To set up the grading, you must take the assessment personally so that Flubaroo can use it as a template for grading all the student assessments. When doing “Auto-grading”, Flubaroo then gives you various options for each question type including: “Identifies Students,” “Skip Grading,” “Normal Grading,” and “Grade By Hand.”

Tip: For the name, use “Answer Key” to remind yourself when you go to create the template for Flubaroo.

Example of Student ResponsesBottom of Flubaroo Spreadsheet

Identifies Students – Used for non-grading purposes, specifically sending the results to participants after completing the assessment.

Skip Grading – As stated, will skip grading the question and won’t be given as a option for sending results to students. This is great for getting their perspective, or testing questions without any consequence to students.

Normal Grading – Will give you the option to provide various point levels for these questions. This would be for the multiple choice/matching style questions that it matches to your answer key.

Grade By Hand – A great way to do short answer questions. However, for most essay style questions, I use Google Docs and the Add-On Doctopus to grade. I will do a blog post about that later on in the year.

Personally, I love the auto-grade option, so that students can get feedback immediately on where they stand with the content. Due to the immediate response, I do not do any short answer questions (besides Identifying Student Type) so that students can know how they did.

Google Classroom

When assigning the assessment to students, use Google Classroom! Create an assignment on Classroom, and add the Google Form Assessment from Drive. What’s great is that it will keep track for you of what students have taken/not taken the assessment. The only frustration is that the grades are not carried over to Google Classroom (but should Google Classroom really be for grades or should it just be used for feedback? Something to think about.).

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Google Forms – Basic Design (Part 1)

Google Forms

This year as a school we began implementing “Student Learning Objectives” as part of our curriculum. In order to do this, we followed the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education of Missouri’s suggested “SLO – Progress – Tracker.” In order for the tracker to be effective, teachers needed an easy way to collect quantifiable data on student performance and content knowledge. For many teachers, the easiest way to do this on a consistent basis is Google Forms! In part 1 of Google Forms, we are going to discuss some ideas of how to design your Google Forms to be effective in the classroom.

Google Forms

To access Google Forms, go to forms.google.com or go to your Drive Account (drive.google.com), click “New” – More – Google Forms. When accessing it from forms.google.com, it will give you quick templates that could be useful to have assessments within minutes.

The Basics About Google Forms

Title

Just like every other Google Apps product, when the Google Form is first created, they are “untitled.” Change the title to the appropriate standard or assessment (Tip: In the title include a shorten name for Formative/Summative Assessment for organizational purposes. For Example: “FA” for Formative Assessment.) I have attached a Google Document that goes into more detail the specific options you can do with the form, so that I can get into designing the form. (Google Forms – Cheat Sheet)

Design

Obviously there are a slew of ways to design your form, but the following has been wonderful for my purposes. The first questions I always ask are First Name, Last Name, Hour, and Password. The two names and password are setup as “short answer” and the Hour “Drop Down.” To get the password question to work appropriately, you go to “Data Validation,” “Text,” “Contains,” enter desired password. Tip: If “custom error text” is left then the password will be revealed to the students. Instead, create a standard response like “Incorrect Password.” For Example, for my American Government test on the Judicial Branch, I could use the password “Chief Justice” that students would use to access the assessment.

Data Validation

After the sign-up page is completed, create a new “section” which are essentially pages to the form. From this point forward, you can incorporate a variety of questions to help you assess your students content knowledge.

Brian “Lewis” Pier suggested that in lieu of a password, create all the necessary copies of the Google Form and connect their responses to the same spreadsheet. With the new option in Google Classroom to assign Forms to specific students, it helps prevent students from seeing the test prior to your class period.

Suggestions

If you are a G Suite for Education (GAFE) school, then I would suggest setting up a short answer question that requires them to put in their school email account. This will allow you to use Flubaroo to send students their results upon completion of their assessment. (Google Forms – Using Flubaroo)

When doing a “Matching Question” use “Multiple Choice Grid.” I have found putting the question on the “row” portion and answers on the “column” portion it has been easiest for students to view. Tip: Put no more than 5 matching words-definitions per grid so that students can easily use the grid.

Be sure and click “Require one response per row,” “Limit to one response per column” and “Shuffle Rows” to help deter cheating between students.

Provide yourself multiple “Sections” throughout the assessment. It helps break-up the test for students and provides opportunities for corrections on the part of the teacher. For example, if a student notices that something is spelled wrong (which happens) students can go to a previous section while you correct the error. Once corrected, students return to the section and it is corrected on their form. (I generally do no more than 7 Multiple Choice Questions per page)

When making these assessments, I first create it on a Google Doc. This is handy when going to create a form, because Google Forms will automatically detect the “Enter” was used and make that into a separate “option.” Here is a Gif demonstrating how it works:

Tip: There is an Add-On to do the Google Form but I generally just have two windows open side-by-side between the doc and form.

On a multiple choice question, I always put the correct answer as the bottom answer. The reason is when students complete the assessment, it makes it easy to identify how the students do collectively. Under the “Responses” tab, the form will color code each option (Gif demonstrating how it looks). Since nearly all my multiple choice questions are four options, then the correct answer will be green (option four is green). Definitely handy when trying to quickly determine collective student comprehension of material.

It is quick and easy to identify content that was not grasped by the students, which allows for re-teaching, analysis of the question/options, etc.

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As the school year rolls along, I thought it was a good time to encourage you to be involved in Twitter.com for professional development purposes. For those who have never tried it before, feel free to go to https://twitter.com/search-home and start seeing what is available to learn today!

Some of the basics include:

1. Twitter handle is your identifying name (similar to email address). For example, my Twitter handle is @coachhoup24 . If someone wants to “tweet at me” (again similar to sending a message on email), they just compose a message with “@coachhoup24 …” and I will receive it.

2. There is nothing wrong with being a fly on the wall with Twitter and just following people. Nothing says that you need to ever personally tweet.

3. Hashtags (#) on Twitter can be used in one of two ways. First to demonstrate your nonverbal communication. For example, a tweet could say, “Today’s lesson plan involved puppets and singing! #TheKidsLovedIt #ProudTeacher”

4. Tweets can use no more than 140 characters, including anyone that you mentioned.

5. If you don’t like what people are tweeting, then simply unfollow them (They will never know!).

Join Us!

If you are considering joining Twitter, here is a resource to help guide you in developing a professional Twitter account: New 2 Twitter Resource . This resource provides ideas on how to set your own account up as a educator and what to do once you are active. When we as a district did a survey a couple months ago, some teachers already involved with Twitter provided some of their “top people to follow.”

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but none-the-less a good place to start.

The final benefit one gets from Twitter is the opportunity to participate in events called, “Hashtag Chats.” One great one to follow is #MoEdChat, which takes place every Thursday at 9 PM CST. It’s a great event to just jump on and see what other educators throughout Missouri doing. One final chat that is great to follow is #GAFESummit, which is used by +EdTechTeam for their Google Summits held throughout the world. It is a “slow chat,” meaning it is happening throughout the day, and most active when they have summits on various weekends.